Wednesday, July 09, 2008

Comics Roundup

I've not done a comics round up for the last couple of weeks, because i) there have been no comics in the shops worth buying and ii) my home internet has been down, so I haven't been able to tell you that there are no comics in the shops worth buying. I have not actually been leading a comics free life, picking up another Love & Rockets compilation and the big Rian Hughes collection that has the Grant Morrison scripted Dan Dare story in it. These are, however, books, so they will not be covered in my comics roundups.

I did pick up two things last week, and now I will talk quickly about them. But before I do that, a plea to readers – surely there are more comics out there coming out in issue form that I should be reading? Maybe you could recommend them to me, either in comments here, or on your own blog (but you should then leave a comment to pimp your own blog first, so that I make sure to read it).

Batman #678, by Grant Morrison, Tony Daniel, and Sandu Florea

This is part of some Batman RIP event thing DC are doing. Maybe at the end of it, Batman will die for a bit, and they will have fun portraying a world without a Batman, but then after a while he will turn out not to be dead or will be resurrected in some way or something, like they did with Superman a couple of years ago. I really hope they do not actually go through the charade of ending this with Batman a corpse, as no one is really going to take seriously the idea that he is gone for good.

But anyway, in this issue Grant Morrison seems to be really going for it in terms of presenting us with a crazy stream of consciousness impressionistic non-narrative that echoes something like Michael Moorcock's An English Assassin. I think maybe the idea here is that Batman, having had the shite knocked out of him last issue (or something, I can't really remember) is now hallucinating or having weirdo visions as he dies or lies comatose. So yeah, deadly stuff, but maybe this Grant Morrison run writing Batman will be better appreciated when collected in book form (unlike his X-Men, which was a total blast in issues).

Last Bus #1, by Patrick Lynch

I have always worked on the basis that Irish comics are rubbish. This rule of thumb has served me well over the years, but maybe now I will have to review it. This comic is one of those "slice of life" things set on the last 230 bus over a couple of nights. A number of characters are introduced and developed, but only in so far as their lives relate to the bus. It's nicely drawn and well observed, and I recommend this unreservedly.

I'm trying to work out where the 230 goes… the number sounds familiar, so I bet it is a bus that sails past one of the many bus stops I sometimes find myself waiting at. Ah well, I bet its terminus is somewhere really nice.